Fixes continue to mount in Mac OS X 10.4.9 seeds

A soon-to-be-released update to Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system will deliver nearly 100 individual bug fixes and code corrections when it's offered for public consumption a bit later this month.

Private test distributions of the software update continued over the weekend for a fourth consecutive week, bearing Mac OS X 10.4.9 builds 8P125 (PowerPC) and 8P2125 (Intel). The bare-bones software updaters weighed in at 71.9 MB and 165.7 MB, respectively.

Despite a flurry of closely-strung builds in January, which sometimes signals an imminent release, those familiar with the latest seeds say Apple engineers continue to add to a mounting list bug fixes now totaling 95.

In particular, the latest builds are said to include at least eight new fixes over builds 8P122 and 8P2122, which made their way to developers last week. Those fixes reportedly target OpenGL, Sync Services, ImageIO, iSync, and memory leaks in graphics driver code.

I like system updates. I hope this one, being the last one on tiger will be good and problem free. It would be nice if it made tiger's performance a bit better also. This also means that Leopard is coming!

Well, we assume this is the last one. 10.4.10 is a possibility, given as much as another 4.5 months before Leopard.

I agree. I expect a 10.4.10 to arrive just before or after the Leopard release to ensure compatibility between the two for people staying on Tiger for a while and people already upgraded to Leopard.

iPhone compatibility could be another reason. The iPhone is scheduled to be released months after 10.4.9. Leopard will probably have iPhone support out-of-the-box, Tiger will need 10.4.10 for that. Expect the iPhone to work with at least 10.4, 10.5, XP and Vista if Apple wants to sell more than just a few.

I certainly hope that one of the bug fixes will address the problem many (not all) of us are having with iDVD. To take 10 hours just to encode the audio for a 1-hour DVD on a Quad G5 just isn't right, and this bug has been around for a long long time. C'mon Apple, gemme back my iDVD.

I certainly hope that one of the bug fixes will address the problem many (not all) of us are having with iDVD. To take 10 hours just to encode the audio for a 1-hour DVD on a Quad G5 just isn't right, and this bug has been around for a long long time. C'mon Apple, gemme back my iDVD.

Ya, I thought encoding with a core 2 duo would be quick....was i ever wrong.

I certainly hope that one of the bug fixes will address the problem many (not all) of us are having with iDVD. To take 10 hours just to encode the audio for a 1-hour DVD on a Quad G5 just isn't right, and this bug has been around for a long long time. C'mon Apple, gemme back my iDVD.

I think that would mean an update to Quicktime. It's supposedly a problem with Compressor too.

I don't think any of Apple's current encoders can max out more than two cores, some codecs barely max out one core, and as you suggest, are very inefficient. There are even some open source encoders available that would max out a quad, handbrake can encode H.264 to VGA res in about real time, including audio. I don't understand why Apple hadn't bothered to update theirs months ago.

Well, we assume this is the last one. 10.4.10 is a possibility, given as much as another 4.5 months before Leopard.

I seriously doubt there will be a 10.4.10. They will instead mask the updates as security patches.

The reason why is that the latest trend of going past .9 versions with .10 and up is confusing for end users, as it follows no known logical mathematical system. The "obvious" followup update to 10.4.9 would be either 10.5 or 10.4.9.1.

We had people replacing their current 1.7.13 Mozilla installations with earlier versions of 1.7.x, thinking that it was the newest version due to the naming scheme. And these were smart people.

Additionally, Apple did not exceed .9 with any of the previous versions of OSX.